This is a person who knows a little more than the average person about computers but not enough to truly be helpful. Usually someone who knows enough to be dangerous or harmful to a computer or it's software but never truly fix an issue.

These people "Pretend" to be valid, professional, well-trained techs. Their charges for services tend to be higher greater than normal because they are really not out to provide a service but only to provide you with a means of blowing your hard earned cash on repairs and replacements that were never needed to fix the original issue.
You can tell a true computer tech from a pretend-a-tech by presenting them with a computer that needs fixed.

A real computer tech will:
Fix the original issue
Also fix any other apparent issues
Clean and optimize the hard drive
Check for Updates & MORE!
All in 2 hours or less for under 150 bucks

A pretend-a-tech will:
Ignore the stated issues
Find several issues that never existed
Recommend that several pieces of hardware need replaced
Cause several issues to come up as a result of their fix
Charge you for 5+ hours of work and tell you that you need a new computer (which you could have bought for the cost of their "service")

You can also tell a pretend-a-tech by the amount of "big" computer words they try and drop in a sentence, real techs understand that all people don't know "techie" and will translate into english, pretend-a-techs will try to complicate their little speech so a rocket scientist couldn't understand what they were saying.

This is where they get you, most people decide at that point that they must know what they are talking about since they speak the language.

The only way to avoid a pretend-a-tech attack is to ask for an explanation in english, if the english explanation makes no sense then you might be in the midst of a pretend-a-tech.
by Levi Doty October 15, 2007
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